The /ligo/www/www was incorrectly upgraded from an SVN 1.6 working directory to 1.8 several years ago, meaning that most CDS machines (which default to 1.6) could not perform any svn operations in this directory. FRS6119 was to revert this working directory back to a 1.6, while at the same time preserving all the non-version controlled data files which reside under this path. This task was complicated by the fact that we had conflicting files and one tree conflict between local modifications and the repo.

Here is the tortuous procedure I came up with

1. update the directory to include pending additions for files with  no conflict

2. commit local mods for files with no conflict

3. resolve the conflicting files and tree

All the above were done using svn-version1.8 on MacOS.

At this point the 1.8 working directory and the repo were synchronized. I then made the working directory a non-working-directory by deleting all the .svn meta directories.

Now, using svn-1.6, I checked out  /ligo/www over the top of this non-working-directory to make it a 1.6 working directory. But first I had to rename those files which are in the repo because checkout has a safety mechanism which prevents file overwriting.